February 2, 1976

Chronicles of Life on the Edge

By JANE LARKIN CRAIN

DREAM CHILDREN
Stories
By Gail Godwin

n "The Odd Woman" (1974), her best-known work so far, Gail Godwin attempted a fleshed-out portrait of a beleaguered but plucky modern woman; the novel virtually
sagged under the weight of the author's earnest sympathies and attentions. "Dream Children," her first collection of short stories, now returns to the bloodless control of her first two novels ("The Perfectionists,"
1970, and "Glass People," 1972), with their internal psychologically naturalistic landscapes. While broadly representative human experience continues to elude, or perhaps simply not to interest her, Godwin at least recovers here
from the oppressive gabbiness of that last book.

Written in a variety of voices and styles, the 15 stories in this volume resist categorization. At one point, as in "The Legacy of the Motes," the author appears as a fabulist, spinning an elusive little tale that seems to say something about
the vanity of human wishes. Elsewhere, as in "My Lover, His Summer Vacation" or in "Some Side Effects of Time Travel," a reasonably straight-talking narrator presides, serving up a slice, however thin, of contemporary
confusion, particularly as it takes its toll on two separate but similarly hapless female protagonists. Shifting gears again, in what may be the least affected and most successful work in the collection, "An Intermediate Stop,"
she turns to traditional narrative techniques in writing about an English vicar promoting his book at a backwater Southern college for women. The story renders a moment of subdued but profound emotional crisis, and the simplest of human
fellowships that shores it up.

Notwithstanding such occasional flashes of affirmation and melioration, Godwin is essentially a chronicler of life on the edge, where isolation and alienation move toward the extremes of nihilism and madness. To be sure, figures reminiscent of the super-wife-mother-career-woman
who befriends Jane Clifford in "The Odd Woman" crop up here and there in "Dream Children," intimations of consoling orderly spheres, but these serve primarily to heighten, by contrast, the dark and dangerous atmospheres
of the stories. In the end, the grim unwelcoming and fantastic hold sway here, as women plot to poison their children, imagine nocturnal visits from babies who were actually born dead, will their own deaths because they are too much needed
and burdened by their familiars, or dream of escape from endless marriages that have yielded only the most frightening estrangement and loneliness.

All but two or three of the stories in this volume in some way amplify, extend or reiterate the themes of Godwin's novels; she is preoccupied with the nature of womanhood -- its particular desires, disappointments, distresses. There has been, needless
to say, much largely autobiographical, and unworthy, fiction generated by women writers in recent years, devoted to the sundry woes of their sex; it should be pointed out that certain refinements of style and sensibility clearly distinguish
Godwin's work from this Mad Housewife's school of novel writing. Still, with less serious and talented authors, she shares an essentially reductive image of women, seeing hem as almost universally passive and feckless. Whatever
impulses of charity or compassion may prompt the creation of these "loser" heroines, the net effect is simply to deprive them of consequence and substance. True, a kind of independence attaches itself to Nora in "Notes for
a Story," in which a woman writer in her mid-thirties, "having her first uneasy bout with security and success," sets up housekeeping with a playwright some years her senior, who has left his wife and daughter for her. But
his work, significantly, is styled as "notes for a story," the narrator jotting reminders at some later time to supply details, dialogue, carefully evoked emotional climates. All but moments of hysteria have an unfinished feel
to them, almost as if to say that the narrator is uneasy about the possibilities of a competent woman who's also troubled and complicated.

Nowhere are Godwin's women less convincing than when she tries to say something about women in love. Although hardened readers of contemporary fiction might be expected to be inured to notions of human love as mere victimization, entrapment, quagmire,
it is still irritating to have to come across, once again, a celebration of rootless, no-risk kind of emotion that Nora claims as the reward for her "stubborn sense of self." From the earth-mother in "The Woman Who Kept
Her Poet" to the elegant man-eater in "Indulgences," these stories are ready to investigate every sort of relationship except those usually complex, difficult and animated ones that real human beings spend most of their
time coming to terms with.

When Godwin's people have disconnected from themselves and from the selves in others, drift in dream worlds whose contours threaten dissolution and violence, the author can be chilling. There is a virtuosity to her craftsmanship, and
it isn't very often that even the most elaborate schemes run away with her. One a first reading, "Dream Children" arrests and engrosses. But on closer inspection, the reader recognizes that the deepest and most consistent
response the writer elicits is really no more than a sauna-like self-pity, and that the special effects are rather frequently too outre for genuine resonance.

Ultimately, the very idiosyncrasy and detachment of Godwin's characters and the worlds they marginally inhabit lend to her writing a tedium and inconsequence that paralyze even her deftest effects. As one reads through the longueurs that take up so much room in these stories, one becomes increasingly impatient for some breakthrough to the real world, for news of its happenings, for representations of engaging destinies acted out by men and women capable of variegations
of feeling and action.